Month: October 2017

There are some things about this blog that I haven’t quite figured out yet, especially the sizes of the images I can post. The image of the rose that I posted a few minutes ago, that I thought would include the whole drawing, turned our to show only a small part of it. So I apologize for possibly confusing you and offer this corrected image, which I hope will show more of the drawing. If it doesn’t, well, I’ll try again, but some other time; it’s nearly 1:00 a.m. here and time to sleep.

Karl Marx is supposed to have said that history begins as tragedy and eventually returns as farce. Too bad he’s not alive to witness the truth of his remarks as the conflict between the Catalan separatists and the central government in Madrid unfolds here in Spain, day by day, drop by drop, in all its relentless absurdity. Perhaps Marx intuited some universal truth about history, or politics, or human nature—or all three. Perhaps not. At this moment, it’s difficult to ignore the sensation that what we are witnessing here is the farce of two mutually-created firing squads aimed at each other, with the rest of Spain trapped in between.Read More

Boats are fundamental in the lives and livelihoods of the people who live on Formentera. It’s the smallest inhabited island of the Baleares, which include Minorca, Majorca and Ibiza and is accessible only by boat. It is roughly 30 square miles in size and, at its extremities, only 12 miles of largely infertile terrain connect one end of the island to the other.Read More